mrry (Happy New Year)
 
Blog [Soap-related pun] 4/Feb/2004
Danny Ayers recently pointed to SUDS (as in "SUDS is Used to Describe Soaps"), an interesting development in the realm of Content Management, crossed with RDF.

Taking its cue from FOAF, which I've mentioned before, SUDS arose from an attempt to overhaul the official Eastenders website, for BBC Online. The developers hit upon the idea of describing the characters and plot-events using an RDF vocabulary, similar to that used in FOAF.

I'm greatly impressed by the idea, and I can't help thinking that there might be further applications of the technology.

Given that the main classes (for the purpose of modelling the intertwined storylines) are Person and Event, I see an application for blogging. For example, a blogging system based on this could map real-life people to Person, and a blog post to Event. Bloggers would have to ensure that TrackBack, or some similar two-way linking technology, is used to connect posts about the same event. Expose this metadata, and let a crawler traverse the links between the event posts. A search interface, given the permalink of a blog post, or some search terms, could then pull out a coherent "event" (based on some system akin to PageRank, which would probably consider the most authoritative post to be the one with the most inbound links), along with a visualisation of the other metadata that is stored with the corpus of posts (based on taking the most frequently-occurring metadata from an analogue of aTF-IDF vector, perhaps).

If the concept is extended, we could view world events as a soap opera, deriving a timeline from a series of the most commented-upon events, and generally capture the zeitgeist....

Is anyone doing this already? I guess it's a bit like Technorati and Daypop, but I think it brings a new angle to either of them, by performing the link analysis.

A bit ambitious then, perhaps, and maybe we don't need all that metadata, but it couldn't harm the idea. We'll see.

Cheers,

Derek.

PS. It was the BBC that commissioned the work that led to SUDS. One more reason why

Click here to find out why.

 
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